Help understanding gnupg needed!

[Ludwig Hügelschäfer]

Hi Julia,

On 17.04.2006 19:25 Uhr, Julia Dashkevich wrote:
> Hi,
> I have just installed GnuPG to use it with Enigmail
> extension for Thunderbird 1.5. 
> Having gone through the setup and key generation, it
> was necessary to make my public key available on the
> web keyserver. Is it true that if i publish it there
> my email address (which comes in the user id) may
> become a target for spammers?

Yes, that is true. But the amount of spam coming through spammers that
are harvesting keyservers is much less compared to posting in newsgroups.

> Is it possible to show
> an existing webmail address in the user id which is
> not the email address i am going to use with
> encryption feature?

Yes, it is possible, but that breaks any encryption front end (like
enigmail) which automatically searches the right key by searching for
the email address in the key description. At least (with enigmail) nasty
work is necessary to manually search the right key for the recipient
when the mail adresses on the key doesn't match the real recipient
address. Encryption with some other front end may not work at all.

> Moreover, will i only be able to send encrypted mail
> to other gnupg users,

Yes.

> or does it matter if the
> recepient has encryption software of the kind?

Yes, it matters. You won't be able to phone to somebody if he hasn't got
a phone. (Roughly) the same is true for encrypted email.

HTH

Ludwig